Integrated Care and Support Solihull Board meeting

Date of Meeting: 30th January 2014

Key Points of Wider Interest Discussed:

A detailed update was given around the Better Care Fund planning template which relates to the original Integration Transformation Fund (ITF) (now known as the Better Care Fund) which is to be spent locally on health and care to drive closer integration and improve outcomes for patients and people with care and support needs. It is clear that most of this will come from existing NHS budgets – it is not new money. The template is to be submitted in draft form by 31st Jan to allow for feedback before final submission by 12th Feb after receiving final approval from the Health & Wellbeing Board on 10th Feb. This fund allows for pooled resources of £6.6m for the year 2014/15 rising to £15.1m in 2015/16 which needs to be invested jointly to get better value for money. It was confirmed that this pooled budget sits outside of the LA.

It is recognised that there needs to be greater awareness of this programme and a joint comms release is being worked on. The ICASS comms team are very busy and to help out there is to be a new jointly funded ICASS and Healthwatch Solihull Engagement Post.

Mike Woodall ran through a couple of documents from Central Midlands CSU showing the combined matched data for Health and Social Care in Solihull showing the large overlap between services for older people. For example of the 41,394 people aged 65 and over in Solihull:

30,805 individual service users were identified in the combined data with a total cost of £105.21M,

More than half of Nursing home residents in 2012/13 either an A&E attendance, Emergency Inpatient spell or both in the same year,

77.9% of all service users that have been identified had at least one outpatient appointment in the last year,

16.5% of all people aged 65 or over were seen in an Ophthalmology Clinic in 2012/13.

Whilst some hospital stays can be reduced in time by increased efficiencies the situation can also be helped by preventative work to reduce hospital admissions. This would be measured by a reduction in emergency admissions.

Potential Follow Up Action/Discussion/Feedback Required:

VCS organisations may be able to help with the efficiencies by attracting external funding to support the joint projects. These are likely to occur at the next level down under the three strands of Early Intervention and Information, Out of Hospital Care, and Hospital Transformation.